Good Eggs: New Online Hub Connects Locavores and Local Foods

A new online marketplace launched July 26 promises to bring together consumers and providers of local foods worldwide. The site is called Good Eggs, and it provides storefronts and e-commerce capabilities for local-foods providers — farmers, bakers, caterers, canners, coffee-grinders, and other businesses. Locavores can search for farmers and foodmakers by city and neighborhood and order online.

Good Eggs is the brainchild of Rob Spiro, a project lead for Google+ and co-founder of Aardvark, a “social search” service that was acquired by Google in 2010. Spiro serves as CEO of Good Eggs; co-founder Alon Salant is CTO.

Spiro tells me that Good Eggs came about because he and Salant wanted “to start a mission-driven company that would make a positive change in the world.” It might sound “corny,” he admits, but “It’s a chance to apply high-quality craftsmanship of software towards a noble purpose.”

To Spiro, the most exciting thing about this new venture “is that the food tastes great. At the end of the day, it’s just more delicious food than you’ll find anywhere else. The local food phenomenon is already making significant change in the world, and we see an opportunity to accelerate that change with great technology.”

Good Eggs is now piloting its model in a few neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, with plans to roll out to the entire Bay Area by the end of 2012 and other cities in the U.S. and worldwide after that.